Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust End

Linda Kinstler was advised not to go searching for her grandfathers remains.

A Latvian SS officer and KGB agent who disappeared after the Second World War, he seemed like the kind of ancestor you would rather forget. But then, one day in 2016, he turned up in the evidence files of an ongoing criminal investigation. The files indicated that he had worked alongside Herberts Cukurs: the 'Butcher of Riga', implicated in the murder of 30,000 Jews, and the only Nazi known to have been assassinated by Mossad.

In Come to This Court and Cry, Kinstler embarks on a journey across three continents, into the archives of seven nations, to uncover the fates of these two men - both members of an SS auxiliary unit in Nazi-occupied Latvia, both the subject of mysterious and unsettled ends. The result is a powerful and arresting debut about family, law, history and nation, and what it means to guard the memory of the Holocaust in this new and uncertain century.